The Road Not Taken to Hell is Paved With Pretensions

[matt_rah]

There have been three main threads I've pursued in my academic career: math, music, and (French) literature. Of these, the third is the one where I met with the greatest success-highest GPA, best relationships with professors, honors thesis, etc. However, I never had any interest in pursuing a graduate degree in French literature (or comparative

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part 2

[samedietc]

Second, the letter makes several claims about graduate study of english that i want to separate (though they're related on some level); in the general order that they appear in the Letter:
a) it's a jargon-y hoax;
b) academic culture elevates criticism over the object (the text disappears, scorn for the writer, etc.);
c) there's no joy in it;
d) people fight over attention/jobs, don't pay attention to truth/beauty;
e) graduate work in english is a scam -- it produces money and cheap labor for the universities, cheap honor for the students;
f) students are too tired to revolt;
g) we'll look back on english like we look back on other humanities disciplines that have fallen (like medieval rhetoric).

I'm going to take these in no particular order. First, (b) 'criticism is valued higher than works' -- that doesn't jive with my experience; the most extreme example would be the older critic of Henry James who tells each class that out job is to supplement the text, which is better and infinitely more complex than our criticism -- and will outlast us all. Every class that I've been in has a different proportion of criticism to literature, but all of the classes I've taken have been centrally about the issues of literature. Even the course on Marxist theory (which I didn't take) is meant to help people understand Marxism and literature (or in some cases, I'm sure, Marxism as literature). The idea that we scorn books is sort of hard for me to refute, because it's so alien from my feelings and experience (I've talked to one or two people who don't care about books/literature, but they all are interested in books, and all see their thinking shaped by those books). I don't know, but isn't worrying about criticism killing art something like worrying that photographs will take your soul? at the end of the day, the art's still there.

(C) 'There's no joy in it.' I don't know what made Helena decide to go to grad school; grad school is a weird place, and a lot of people do have trouble modulating from one form of reading ("I like this book") to another form of reading ("This book makes me think of..."); it's weird to make a task out of something you love; but at the same time, and i guess i can only speak of my experience, i decided to go to grad school because i find thinking about texts authentically joyful. That doesn't mean I don't read for fun and take joy out of books that way also -- though it is true to say that I have less time to read than other people (i just finished Gaiman's American Gods -- how many years later?); but often, i take a different sort of pleasure from analyzing works -- but, you know, pleasure is pleasure, and i think there is joy in this work.

(f): "students too tired to revolt" -- as per my comment about having less time to read than other people, this is true. Helena Y. says that students work the same hours as investment bankers, and i only know one banker, so my sample could be skewed, but in my experience, we work longer hours -- in fact, in some instances, we don't stop working. i mean, i take my work home with me; in fact, my home is mostly workspace. which means that, yes, in general, we are too tired (and too tied into the system of reward/punishment) to take a stand. but at the same time, in some issues, there is some revolt. here at the u of c, we're talking about forming a graduate student union to address some funding issues that we have.